KELLAN THACKERAY MIXING CLOSE TALKER WITH AN
AVID S6L 16C & FLUX:: SPAT REVOLUTION
Close Talker Brings Fans
into the Music
How the Saskatoon Indie Band Staged Innovative 3D-360 Silent Headphone
Concerts in Intimate Venues Across Canada
T
he music of Close Talker is not
balls-to-walls rock and roll. It
doesn’t beg for a blaring PA and
beer bottles waved aloft. No, it
begs for intimacy.
Close Talker – the Saskatoon-based trio of
multi instrumentalists Matthew Kopperud, Will
Quiring, and Christopher Morien – make evoc-
ative music punctuated by hypnotic rhythms,
haunting atmospherics, and soft, soulful vocals.
It isn’t party music; it’s music to vibe out to and
lose yourself in.
As such, when planning shows around the
release of their latest LP, How Do We Stay Here?,
the band wanted to create a listening experi-
ence that truly focused on the music. The result
was a series of 3D-360 silent headphone con-
certs in unusual locales across Canada where
fans experienced a live, immersive binaural mix
in real time that placed them in the music.
Bringing Close Talker’s concept into reality
required a bit of good timing and luck in the
form of meeting LS Media’s Hugo Larin, but the
vision really began in the tour van with some
fun brainstorming between Kopperud and FOH
engineer Kellan Thackeray.
34 PROFESSIONAL SOUND
By Michael Raine. Photos by Dale Bailey.
“It kind of stemmed from a selfish place,
to be honest with you. We just wanted to break
our own wheel as a band. We didn’t want to
just release a few singles, release a video, and
then an album, and then just kind of do what
was typical or expected,” recalls Kopperud.
They were ruminating on the idea of a
listening party, which in itself is nothing unusual
– artists hold listening parties for new albums all
the time. But they wanted people to really listen.
“You scrutinize every little detail and nu-
ance in the studio and you hope that people
notice and care, but it’s kind of hard to combat
that, especially in this soundbite culture of
quantity over quality. As a band, our buzzword
is ‘intentional’ – everything we do is very in-
tentional and curated and we try to make it as
meaningful as possible. So, we thought, ‘OK,
let’s have a listening party where our closest
friends can hear all the sweat-equity that went
into our record.’ Then, we thought, ‘Let’s do head-
phones so there’s not the temptation of talking
and everyone can escape reality for a hot minute
and just be still and listen,’” Kopperud explains.
As the brainstorming continued, they
wanted to take it a step further than a tradition-
al silent disco, and so married the headphone
concept with the idea of playing the album
live in its entirety. Meanwhile, as the listening
party idea continued to evolve, Thackeray,
who was living in Toronto at the time, heard
that LS Media was doing local demos of the
Avid S6L live console and decided to check
it out. When Thackeray met Larin and his
colleague Benoit Favreau, they also showed
him a demo of Spat Revolution, a real-time
3D audio mixing software from French com-
pany Flux::. That’s when things started to fall
into place for this unique, immersive concert
experience.
Afterward, Thackeray sent Larin an email.
“‘Hey man, here’s what we’re trying to do,” he
wrote. “Can your software do this? What’s the
support like? And is this the right product
for us?” The answer was a “yes” to everything,
which settled it for Thackeray. “We were so
close to going with a different console and
binaural system, but after hearing Spat, seeing
its integration with the S6L, and talking with
Hugo, I knew that this was the right product
for us, and I am so thrilled that everything
went down the way it did,” he says.